Brush chippers are well known machines for grinding brush, branches and limbs, to chips. It is also known to use a winch to pull bigger limbs to the machine, so that an operator does not need to move the branches entirely manually. Examples can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,138,932 to Moore, U.S. Pat. No. 6,446,889 to Moore and U.S. Pat. No. 7,044,409 to Stelter, et al., all three of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
Brush chippers use a feed mechanism to pull brush relatively slowly, and at a controlled rate into a high speed cutter mechanism that acts on the material, cutting and grinding it into small chips. The brush being processed by these machines is typically not preprocessed, other than having been cut into small enough pieces to fit into the feed mechanism, and is often contains many branches at various angles. This brush can snag the winch line. If the winch line is snagged by the brush and pulled into contact with the cutter mechanism, it will be damaged, and possibly the machine will be damaged, or the winch line itself may become a hazard. Thus, there is a need for a system that promotes coordinated used of the winch and the feed mechanism, to avoid this situation.